Jacqueline Smith: Why did it take so long to stop 'peeping prosecutor'?

Published 11:01 pm, Saturday, August 11, 2012

Superior Court in Danbury on White Street is a reasonable walk from our newspaper over on Main, so when there's an interesting case unfolding, I'll go listen.

The opening arguments of the prosecution in a murder case. The judge's comments on the sentencing of a prominent downtown landlord. I've walked over to the courthouse, up the steps and on into the third-floor courtroom, part of a throng in both cases, to hear the proceedings.

Was someone secretly photographing my legs those times? It seems paranoid to even think that.

But, shockingly, it is possible. For untold numbers of women.

A senior assistant state's attorney, 52-year-old David Holzbach, admitted last month that he indeed had been surreptitiously videotaping women's legs and ankles at the Danbury courthouse.

He would get to work early and set up a camera in his car to catch women walking from the parking lot into the courthouse; he viewed the video from his office.

He had a "spy video pen," which he would aim at women's legs and ankles in the courtroom. He had a hand-held video gaming system with a camera. He had a hollow box with a one-way mirror.

As a woman wondering whether my legs were among the trove of videotapes or photos, there's a creepy "ick" factor.

But for women who worked in the courthouse every day, it must have been aggravating, intimidating, infuriating, humiliating.

Some complained. Some took to wearing pants, so as not to attract the attention of the peeping prosecutor and his video pen. But that didn't stop him.

Why was this behavior allowed to go on for so long?

Twenty years ago -- yes, 20 years -- Holzbach was reprimanded by his then-supervisor for videotaping three members of the courthouse staff without their knowledge. In the hallways. In the courthouse. In the parking lot.

"One incident involved Holzbach lying on the floor of his office and filming a courthouse employee through his office window as she walked the hall in the State's Attorney's Office," an investigative report released last week through this newspaper's Freedom of Information request stated.

His office was moved.

Holzbach said he refrained for about 15 years. Do we believe that? In 2002 a woman reported him, but did not file a formal complaint.

In 2006 he received another written reprimand for "clandestinely photographing a female intern" in the courthouse.

Leading up to the most recent incident -- the one that led to his firing on Aug. 1 -- Holzbach had been suspected of videotaping women for several months. The report states that after Christmas last year a fellow employee confronted him and basically told him to stop.

Why, then, did it take until April 27 for someone to confiscate the "video spy pen?"

There were other signs that this prosecutor was behaving terribly inappropriately at work.

In his state office he had four bankers boxes full of "pictures of women, real and graphic comic book style," some "bound, gagged and in distress," the investigative report said.

Four big boxes of that disgusting stuff! And the collection was labeled and categorized.

One employee "described hearing the sound of clipping scissors often in Holzbach's office during the day," the report said.

The image of a starched white shirt prosecutor busily clipping away at porn, filing and categorizing the images, dashing out to the parking lot to adjust a secret camera in his car, figuring out how to place his spy pen just so in a spiral notebook and angle it to women's legs and ankles in the courtroom is too much.

This whole bizarre scenario comes down to a primary question:

Why did it take so long to stop this creepy behavior toward women in the courthouse?